Happiness through exercise of Intellect

Found this (circuitously) from Leighton Smith's well-organised web site (asp's, no less). The money quote (got to stop using that phrase - ed. OK, boss):

"If happiness comes from a sense of competence and efficacy, the welfare state is worse than a lottery. If the welfare state does what it is supposed to do, abolish problems and risks and guarantee a certain material result whatever we do, then it deprives us of many of our challenges and our responsibilities. That actions have consequences, both rewards and punishments, is not just good because it helps us make better decisions, it is also important because it gives us the sense of control. Without this direct feedback our sense of hopelessness and frustration grows."

Just wander to down the nearest ghetto Glorious State Housing area (if you dare) to get a taste of the aforesaid hopelessness and frustration.

And then move right along. Couldn't possibly be such a linkage. Nothing to see here. Glorious Leader has said so!

Fisking Nipper(t)

Matt Nippert is a young Lefty (what else?) journalist at the Listener and has an article in this weeks' issue. Fisking this is the old story - fish - barrel - shoot. But someone has to do it.

His Hitchens vs Galloway debate reportage seems to have been penned from the point of view of a fellow brawler.

The page was titled "Celebrity punch-up" Oh please.

The debate was like Margaret Atwood vs Pamela Andersen, held at Hooters. That is: a total mis-match, viewed from nothing but partisan seats. Far from 'meeting his match', as Nippert's sub-head has it, Hitchens outclassed both his opponent and the crowd.

Hitchens is a frequent contributor to Atlantic Monthly (a publication with rather discerning editorial tastes), has a long and erudite publication list, and has for most of his life been an ardent and articulate supporter of the Left. And that, rather than being a 'gung-ho ally of the neocons', Hitchens has been a long-time supporter of the Kurds, and has heavily critised aspects of the Iraq war.

Nippert could have reported, to balance the ledger, that George Galloway stands accused of Oil-for-Fraud bribes via the Mariam Appeal, has called for a jihad on British troops, and was expelled from the British Labour Party for that act. He could have reported that Galloway gained his Parliamentary seat of Bethnal Green and Bow from Oona King, a long-time critic of Saddam Hussein, partly by a populist appeal to local militant Islamists, but also by a whispering campaign against King based on her sex and her African/Jewish ethnicities.

In fact, Nippert would probably have been better to just point to this rather better article about the debate, from another Leftie but somewhat more well-regarded rag.

Instead of just apparently cutting and pasting the juicy bits.

In fact, he missed a nice ending quote from the Granuardi piece, so I'll do the honours:

"So it was left to the market to decide. A post-event book signing was convened and it was noticeable that the queue was almost twice as long to see Hitchens."

Germany, Canada and lil' ol' NZ.....

David Warren has another swipe at the management of long-term decline: the money quote:

"The SPD is to Germany as the Liberals to Canada: the party to manage national decline. The long-term success of each has depended on turning "voters" gradually into "clients". From the humblest welfare recipients, up to big businessmen whose fortunes depend on sweetheart regulatory arrangements, each party pitches itself, as crassly as necessary, to the beneficiaries of state largesse. Their supporters therefore become quite inured to massive corruption, and revelations of ineptitude -- and remain so, as long as they are guaranteed preferred access to the government trough.

The intention of such governments is not to run the economy into the ground, nor even to destroy the moral order through experiments in social engineering. That is simply the natural consequence of their way of doing business. "

Does this guy have Labour Party HQ miked and wire-tapped, or what?

About that German election

As usual, Mark Steyn draws an apt analogy. Now consider our own fair situation once we hook up all those viable wombs hard-working families to the welfare teat of Nanny State carefully crafted policy of Working For Families.

Then ask them to vote.

Possibly for some party or other that proposes to wrench the teat away for the greater good or even just economic sustainability.

Ho hum, it's Tui time. Tax minimisation time, anyone? Vote-with-feet time? This whole election bribe is certainly a powerful perverse incentive to negative wealth generation.

Looks up, cups hands to industrially deaf ear, why, is that the sound of fiscal pigeons coming home to roost?

Listening to

As little TV and radio as possible. The shallowness of what passes for dear little NZ's public political commentary is just too much. The blogs, of course, rule as always. I tend to read financial papers' analyses (Australian Financial Review, Independent, Financial Times) to get a nuanced and intelligent picture.

Which is not looking too pretty, frankly; we are in for another three years of a redistributionist, lame-duck gummint about to encounter a perfect storm:

- Labour and its coalition partners (whoever they turn out to be, and for how long) are effectively shorn of a political mandate by the near-enough 50/50 split between social engineers of any breed and those interested in individual rights, freedoms and responsibilities. There will be considerable social resistance to further meddling, nanny-state-ing, and tribalism.

- And at the end of three long years (or maybe much sooner) Labour will lose office, for certain. Why?

- There is an economic storm brewing, composed of about equal parts external shocks (commodity prices, oil, energy) and internal mismanagement (energy and transport infrastructure provision, industrial relations expectations, welfare entitlement expectations), all considerably highlighted during the election campaign. These are not well managed by even conventional centre-right gummints, let alone leftish ones.

- The Minister of Finance is comprehensively discredited. Hid a bag of goodies under a Budget carpet, claimed they weren't there (oh, no room for Tax Cuts!) then flourished them with glee at key points during election campaigning. Financiers take a dim view of such obfustication. The MoF will have a long, torrid three years.

- Election bribes will cost dearly - Student Loans at 0% interest (you heard that right - and so has practically every arbitrageur in the First World) is costed by Treasury at close to $NZD1 billion.

- Existing financial cock-ups will cost more too: Kyoto was costed at roughly $USD15-20 per carbon tonne, but current world trading prices are close to twice that. So a $NZD 600m credit has turned into close to $NZD 2 billion debit. Funded by You Know Who.

- Turning working families into welfare beneficiaries is not going to do wonders for entrepreneurship or wealth generation generally. The signals are confused, and the deadweight inherent in getting, counting, redistributing taxes is considerable. And think of the stigma in waiting to apply for some of your own money back, in WINZ queues with hoodies, druggies, buskers and assorted rent-a-scum!

- There will be a vigourous, vocal and high-business-IQ Opposition snapping at the heels of every Gummint initiative, action, perk, slip-up, and SNAFU. The election campaign for the Centre-Right has effectively started now.

- The public at large has heard (if not acted on) a key message about tax - "Hey, that was My money first!" This will continue to grumble away in tax-payers' gizzards, and may have some surprising and unpleasant results during the term.

So after three inglorious years, during which time a fragile, electorally barely-sanctioned gummint muddles its lonely way through this swamp, all it will have to show for it is exhaustion, a more completely demonstrated lack of competence, an ecomony several clicks further down the OECD scale, and a greatly deepened resentment amongst voters. Who will then vote for? Anyone But Labour......

For a working example of what this looks like, read almost anything about Germany.

So even though I'm tempted to break out the 2005 Schadenfreude, I do have to remind myself that this is My country I'd be toasting.

So back to the title of this rant: I'm listening to Marta Topferova - Czech, gorgeous contralto voice, best harp playing I've heard in my life. And soon to be experienced with a replacement speaker set-up: budget price but decent sounds - KEF Q1's bookshelfs, and a little KEF PSW1000 subwoofer in the corner to round out the bass a bit. The great big ol' Infinity RS4001's move to the B speaker wires - they are sounding quite flat now.

A Czech, singing South American genres, in flawless Spanish. A telling line from one of the reviews: She is living proof that gaining a deep spiritual connection with a country and its music does not require hereditary ties .

Tell that to the new tribalists.

Metal in Melbourne

Back in the glorious city (and a great boutique hotel) for a whole week, in the implementation phase of a leetle project. Let no-one kid you: replacing a core system is like tuning a running engine: it's hard not to get your fingers in the fan. 'Nuff said, perhaps.

It struck me during one of my rambles around the Yarra and inner city, just how much metal is used in artworks here. There's the obvious arty steel rivetted cover on the freeway in, the artily angled steel close by and at the convention centre, the gorgeous bridges (currently being re-painted as part of the Games preparation). But a whole lot of less monumental artwork is all around, and a considerable proportion is metal.

Now obviously Oz is a mine and a beach, so one can expect a lot of familiarity with the raw material. And equally obviously, the attraction of metal in public pieces is resilience and strength: hard for your average vandal to make much of an impression on a 40mm steel plate compared to (say) a routed wooden sign. But there's a little more to it, perhaps.

It takes a good craft knowledge to actually do much with metal, and a certain apprenticeship. Unlike say painting, where the tray-and-roller school can be faked pretty convincingly after a quick trip to the DIY shop. And it takes capital plus confidence to start, too. Oz has a larrikin, confident edge to its persona, and that might help. But I can't help wondering if the great open spaces here do encourage a wider, larger, more full-blooded response to things, compared to the incestuous, walled-in, me-in-my-little-valley artistic hothouse flower one sees so much of in NZ?

(And which latter one does not encourage, might I add, by ever, ever buying the results. Give me technical mastery first, then design, execution, quirkiness. Then I just might buy. And if you ever write words in a painting, see me turn around and keep looking elsewhere. That's why we print books.)

Perhaps Oz metal art is like the CEO's preference for a corner office: the wider vision which gets stuff down, with the materials at hand?

And talking of corner offices, the new Eureka Apartments (554 apartments, 88 storeys, all corners, a blade shape, not imposing, more growing than being built out of the South Bank): a floor layout that sees every apartment at a corner? Amazing building: they are still building around floor 70 and up (central lift tower is at full design height of about 300m). The crane on top of the lift tower is lit at night: just think of how much you would want to be paid to go up the boom (it's a conventional angled jib) to change the flood if it went out.....

OK, so if words are out, my favourite painting?

J W M Turner: Rain, Steam and Speed: Great Western Railway. 1844.

National Gallery, London, last time I saw it.

Tribes (ht: Instapundit)

Just RTWT.

That ol' welfare state shtick...

This post linked by Bill Quick hisself, encapsulates all that is wrong with the welfare state. There have always been two broad ways to get something that you want: make it/make the money to buy it yourself; or just go and take it off someone else who has it, but cannot defend it. Guess which path the WS rewards?

Yup, it's the someone else's money/property every time. Never your own damn fault.

Polls, Katrina and Gaia

Great to hear the Colmar Brunton polls (insert usual caveats here) having National leading. On the Aged parents run last night, interesting to hear that THAT pamphlet (you know, the one that has the Greens running round in small circles bleating 'smear' while hastily cooking up a few of their own) has had an effect! I.e. the pamphlet has been read and taken to heart. And that Labour will be short at least one more AP vote...... Bwahahahaha!

Yes, I've put my money where my mouth is and contributed $US100 to the Sallies for Katrina relief. And logged that with NZ Bear. Do the same, why don't you.

The inevitable crap surfaces, linking Katrina with global warming, building on river deltas or under sea level, and similar statements of doom-mongering. Rather reminiscent of our own little bout of tsunami-related verbiage here in poor, tribal NZ. A certain elderly gay seagull has evidently squawked on about the local tsunami nonsense. Donald Sensing brings some balance to the overseas debate, and the crew at Tech Central Station are as usual onto it immediately with healthy doses of fact-based commentary.

Moral of the story is: those Civil Defence advices, about having 3 days worth of water, food, essential supplies and a way to heat stuff readily to hand in the home, are really pertinent. An SUV and a way of defending oneself aren't on the CD list, but maybe should be......

Reading Viewing Listening - Lists

Having been treated to a week in Melbourne on a project, caught the Dutch Masters exhibition at NGV. Highlights:

Not the Vermeer (sorry!) - it's about the size of an A4 page and is frankly better done in reproduction on the catalogue's cover.

The Rembrandts - expressive faces, a certain dash in the line.

The landscapes (so many!) - the big-sky genre is my favourite. Low horizon line, and clouds/light effects are beautifully done in the best renditions. Names: van Ruysdael, Hobbema, Pynacker, Moreelse (Girl in a Mirror, just to confound the list...)

Like most world class galleries, NGV has benefitted from bequests and trusts. An early straw stuck into the rich vein of gold-rush money continues to fund purchases, and there are many astounding private collections which have been donated.

Favourites here:

The Japanese woodblocks (Utamaro, Hokusai, Kuniyoshi) - a small selection from a vast store, including many early-impression prints (tend to be sharper)

Durer - NGV has a massive collection, a fraction of which is on display. Again, many early impressions, which are even more crucial in some of the printing techniques such as drypoint, where the plates very quickly lose definition.

Impressionists - including a favourite JWM Turner, whose late pieces (1840's) are forerunners of the movement as a whole - but a very good selection of Pissaro, Sisley, Manet and a thoughtful grouping overall.

As for most decent galleries, too much for a single visit: and we didn't hit the Federation Square site (Australian and Pacific art) - ran out of time.

Melbourne as always, delights with the architecture in the central city - try 333 Collins for a quick sample (outer suburbs and industrial areas are the standard blah) and in the better suburbs around South Melbourne. The obligatory Acland St (St Kilda) tram pilgrimage but (sniff) no gelato - closed up for winter. Come on, Green Apple, it's officially Spring!

And notwithstanding the multiculti ninnies' opinions on oppression, art, kultcha and so on ad infinitum, the things that stay around to evidence said kultcha tend to be (surprise!) great artworks, and architecture which has survived the Darwinian selection process. And, bow to the vanished Bamiyan Buddhas and British church decorations, survived various iconoclastic episodes.

Reading has tended to concentrate on heavy topics interspersed with light ent:

Heavies:

Winning the Oil endgame - a wonderful summary based on hard data and private initiative. Dedicated to the proposition that the Stone Age didn't end because we ran out of rocks. And the price signals are going to really push this sort of thing: nice aspect is that no 'to-be-announced' technology is involved in Lovin's suggestions.

The Command of the Ocean - N A M Rodger. Hugely detailed and notable for the sidelights into social history, from a historian of the old, pre-we-are-all-evil-colonisers school. Another engrossing old fart, in other words.

Landscape and Memory - Simon Schama. OK, cheating here, still reading it. Marvellous premise: that landscape is an artefact of human perception, and thus its depictions and commentary reflect the Zeitgeist - spirit of the times or age. Not forgetting the Weltanschauung - the world-view of the writer. How to tease these apart? That's a lifetime's work.

England- An Elegy - Roger Scruton. An unabashedly personal but deeply English book: he laments the loss of 'enchantment' as embodied in the rituals, clubs, brass bands, and generally bottom-up activities of Blighty As She Was. A quote (about church interiors) seems in order:

"That this [deep impression made on those who entered] had not come about without a painful history was evident from the very appearance of those quiet interiors. Iconoclasm and puritan vandalism had swept through these arches like a boiling tide through seashore caverns and, retreating, had left them bare. But you sensed too that the storms had passed, that the architecture was the purer and cleaner for the brutal torrent that had washed away its ornaments, and that the stunned tranquillity of those pitted walls would remain everlastingly."

Quite so. It echoes what we felt at those Evensongs - a quietitude which was the product of a turbulent yet burnishing history.

Light Ent:

Jasper Fforde: the Thursday Next series. Literary to a fault, Python meets Richard II meets Adams (Doug). It really does help (no plot giveaways here) to have actually read Jane Eyre. Great fun.

A Year in the Merde - funny and pertinent.

The Corrections - Franzen. I almost never read a book which is too hot-right-now - I prefer to take my time and read it when the fuss has died down and a bit of history and sanity has intervened. Loved this: oddly uplifting given the subject matter.

Listening:

Anything by Tom Waits: no,that's not a title. Look it up, you lazy sausages. I do think he needs to be listened to in order, to appreciate the transitions (say between Burma Shave - Foreign Affairs, to Gun Street Girl - Rain Dogs - to Another Man's Vine - Blood Money. And possibly not by youngsters - there is a cyclic element in Waits that demands a certain number of years under the belt. But of my own Desert Island Tracks on the Muvo, Waits owns a good chunk of the playlist.

Madeleine Peyroux - marvellous, old time jazz/blues crossover stuff. The earlier CD with her ex is thin and too much not-her.

Nick Cave - Boatman Calls and since. We have both found that the early tracks on Boatman have become strongly associated with England and our time in London, despite the fact that we heard NC for the first time well after the trip! This rather puts paid to the theory that smell is the organiser of memory. Must actually go inside Brompton Oratory the next trip.

Bob Dylan - early and late. The middle years are frankly forgettable. Another old codger getting better as he (and we) age(s).

Mile Davis - Kind of Blue. The cleaned-up version, from the tape recorder that wasn't running slow on the day. A true 20th century classic.

Here endeth today's Lists.

Gaia's revenge on Renewable Energy Policy

Not too long after our own little local 1-turbine Windy Power For the Masses experiment up on Gebbie's Pass was destroyed by a 'sudden change in wind direction', we hear of another Windy Irony.

As the inimitable Mark Steyn notes, who says Gaia doesn't have a sense of humour?

With a history like this, the insurance premiums on exposed turbine farms alone will be a significant chunk of operating expense. After all, it's like having a dam washed away...noooo - don't say that's happened too?

See this for a quick if irreverent survey of the current NZ state of play in Energy Policy.

A healthy (EU) Constitution

Telegraph | Opinion | A healthy Constitution is a succinct, pointed and thoroughly deserved riposte to the bloated, anti-democratic Pan-European effort termed the 'EU Constitution'. The old Constitution was decisively rejected by France and by Holland: this new effort should be the first of many alternative proposals. One detects the influence of the US Constitution, too, in the Telegraph's efforts - funny, that. After all, the US has been a democracy a couple of centuries longer than Germany, and substantially longer than France (where it took a good chunk of the 19th century to wriggle free of the Second Empire...). And it's (the Telegraph's effort) is - gasp - readable! The commoners will be able to understand it! Second gasp. Why, this will never do.

Sigh - another blogger says it better (if with a Canuck accent...)

This post from the ever-readable Gods of the Copybook Headings blog, demonstrates yet again the universality of human nature, and the ultimate futility of governments 'trying to help'. While GCBH speaks to a Canadian context, the themes echo loudly down in this poor, increasingly tribal, and thoroughly victimology-friendly corner of the Pacific.

Belly laugh of the day

Dr Suarez has read of DAS SNOW BOOT: What will those nastily clever narco-traffickers be able to purchase next? Sure saves laundering money through lots and lots of little business fronts. The money quote:

"When you think about it, cocaine is really a pretty brilliant option for sub-mariners. Instead of sharing beds, they wouldn't fucking need them! Any smooth, horizontal surfaces would be kept impeccably clean. The preponderance of mirrors would encourage good hygene. The crew would avoid catching colds, given that one errant sneeze could cost them $1,500 on the open market."

But of course, here in li'l ol' NZ, home of the 6 Herky-bird Air Force (2 serviceable at any given time) and the proud frigate Canterbury to patrol the high seas - whoops, no, sorry, they are just about to sink that one somwhere in Cook Strait to provide Equitable Housing Outcomes for a bunch of green-lipped mussels - a drug cartel with a submarine would be detected........just how again?

Sigh.

The future of dead-tree publishing

Power Line, in a piece entitled: Robert Burns, call your office, has quoted what I think is the best-put, most succinct (always a desirable quality) yet forceful argument for the ascendancy of electronic publishing. MSM, with their ludicrous blend of rigidity, now-obvious bias, a pervasive animus to things Webby, and most embarrassingly, a rather visible lack of intellectual horsepower compared to their on-line nemeses, are in the cross hairs.

From my own reading patterns over the last three years or so, future media will concentrate on things very local; the penetrating and real-time analysis will be Web-based; thoughtful pieces in quality journals such as Atlantic Monthly will live on; and there will continue to be niche magazines, in fact ever nicher.

But as the Powerline piece notes, trying to cover all bases, as the dead-tree newspapers and general purpose magazines (like our own funny little Listeria, ht NZPundit) is a recipe for irrelevance.

Who'd a thunk it? Osama as apostate

On reading this, two phrases meandered across the frontal lobes (or was that the amigdila - the older, reptilian bit?).

Hoist by his own Petard
Shooting Fish in a Barrel

Whatever: the image of OBL as a religious outcast, condemned as such by Spanish Muslims, is certainly one to savour.

Innovation as the driver

This Arnold Kling article says in much better words what I have been thinking out loud about in a more stumbling way and with less articulate language. Combining known elements in unknown combinations is the real value-add. There are pointed side-swipes at governments and bureaucracies, too. Kewwl.

Alive in 2005

Some juicy new sites, especially for NZ readers who are currently being regaled with tales about the Wananga, and down the maw of which we currently tip NZD 0.25 Billion. Like most white folk, I have no particular issue with public money going to what Tom Wolfe characterised in 'Bonfire of the Vanities' as 'steam control'. Having a lot of poor, young males hanging about idle is a recipe for societal distress at the very least, as Lee Harris discusses.

Roger Sandall (author of "The Culture Cult") on his site has some very pithy things to say about this sort of misty-eyed hankering after imagined pasts. Mostly, when translated into current-context policy, these 'designer tribalism' ideas are a disaster in the long run, as they act to increase a sense of identity, but at the direct expense of involvement with and understanding of the wider society.

It's all too recognisable here in the Shaky Isles.

Back to life, with Te Reo thoughts and a Billion 7500G wireless setup too!

It's been some time (OK, six months) since the last post, and pressure of work is as good an excuse as any to plead.

On the equipment front, the trusty but dusty D-Link DSL-500 has been tossed and a Billion 7500G wireless set-up substituted. With the addition of a work machine, we found ourselves with 3 Centrino laptops and lots of cables, so it was a natural choice. The selection process was aided by a marvellous Oz site which, together with the Whirlpool forums convinced me to steer well clear of Telecom's D-Link offering (the DSL-G604T+). The Billion worked out of the box, and I've added MAC address filtering plus port filtering to secure things. WEP and/or WPA to follow, but these are a bit trickier...

Another idealistic article recently in the NZ Listener from a writer who spends time in Quebec, about how golly gosh wunnerful it would be if we mandated a dual-language labelling regime here in Helengrad. I half-penned a letter to the editor, then realised, WFT, just do it here. Less constraints, more to the point, quicker. Here's the unbowdlerised version.


Barbara Burstyn's article on 'With language comes understanding', urges an enforced dual-language environment for New Zealand - English and Maori.

She bases her argument on the English/French admixture in Quebec. This will reap a rich harvest of unintended consequences if implemented.

Burstyn's comparison of English and French is instructive: both have common roots, and shared equally in the explosion of knowledge and the application thereof, that have provided us with our modern world. After all, the native speakers of each, are only 20 minutes now apart by EuroStar and half a day in a boat apart, for the rest of recorded history. One would be very surprised indeed if such close linguistic cousins were not able to co-exist in a mandated dual-language area.

But French and English are not at all like Maori and English. And Burstyn's choice of this particular pairing, obscures the issues.

To take the two most serious: the economic impact, glossed over in her article with the phrase 'importers and manufacturers of everything consumed..would be affected'. Let's think that one through. Every large supermarket carries around 20-30,000 SKU's. Every one of those would have to be dual-language labelled, and not just with a cosmetic transliteration: a heavy-duty, tested, completely up-to-date translation which would stand up to, for example, product liability legal challenges.

Supermarkets are a small fraction of the commercial environment.To use an analogy - suppose Melbourne (Australia, look on a map, around the same population size as the whole of NZ at say 4 million) had it's own native language. Let's call it Melburnian. What chance would it have, as a single city, of pursuading every supplier to supply Melburnian labels, workshop and training manuals, price lists, Web sites, credit card imprints, tram passes and street signs? Suppliers would simply decamp to Sydney, Brisbane or Perth and a thriving cross-state under-the-counter market in monolingual goods would rapidly ensue.

But by far the most damaging consequence of the enforced labelling regime would be for the Maori language itself. It's 'taonga' (treasure) status rests entirely on the fact that it is one of the very few pre-scientific and pre-literate languages to have survived alongside a global language. It has sufficient speakers and enough political wind pressure behind it to keep it alive in some form.

But to offer it up as a serious commercial partner to English in the manner suggested is daft. The Maori language is pure oratory, oral history, and essential if elemnetary survival knowledge. It is completely devoid of all Western scientific, engineering, mathematical and literature-based terms, concepts and context - elements which were themselves some 2,500 years in the making. It could not have been otherwise, and that is it's distinctiveness.

To attempt what Bursytn suggests would be to subject this survivor language to massive change. Just to translate, in legally acceptable terms, one line of the label before me on a bottle of milk: 'Calcium - 280mg per 200ml - 35% of the recommended daily intake' into Maori, is to require the importation of the Periodic Table, the metric system, and the mathematical concepts of fractions. And in their full sense, not just a 'William-to-Wiremu' makeover of word sounds without the concepts to underpin them. It is hard to imagine (something Burstyn seems to do a lot, in her article, BTW) that this would not fundamentally alter the Maori language by overwhelming it with neologisms and, in the truest sense of the word, 'foreign' concepts.

It is certainly possible to force such a change in the language, by mandating it and thus opening the valve to the flood of new terms, concepts, sounds, and their written equivalents. But it is certain that the Maori language which resulted from that process would bear very little resemblance to that existing now.

Somehow, I don't think that's what Burstyn imagined could happen.

But then, idealists rarely have to worry about the details. Wherein the devils reside.

Tribes Tripes Tropes

Richard Brookhiser has some pithy words about the difficult project of modernity. It would be nice to think that local advocates of 'da Tribe' should read them and pause. A little teaser:

"More and more, everyone in the world wants self-esteem; less and less, everyone gets it from the kinship group and village customs. For the missing extra jolt, they turn to totalist simplifying ideologies, or they begin the long slog into modernity."

It ain't easy being modern - all those choices! And it's very easy, as RB notes, to delegate the task to a 'simplifying ideology' - religion (think, Islam, where man is specifically regarded as unable to formulate new, let alone criticise existing, prescriptions), a State (think, Stalinist Russia or France), or a Tribe (you have a wide choice here, in NZ, some State subsidised). In all these cases, the burden of choice falls away.

Of course, it's a form of enslavement (something historically closer to many groups' actual practises than any would admit), a brake on innovation, and an economic dead end (read anything by Gareth Morgan). But it's a price that historically many or most have been willing to pay.

An aspect of the price is the group rituals which are needed to cement the 'us' against all 'others', which provide a certain surveillance to ensure that members do not develop seccessionist tendencies, which act to replace the ever-present danger of individual thought, and which provide a pleasing pattern or sequence to a day.

I have always had an aversion to these rituals without really knowing why - apart from the obvious anti-intellectual aspects. The ones that come closest to hooking me are the traditional church services we struck in England: but even there, the religion was a much watered-down version of high-church Anglican, and it was a visible triumph of faith over actuality for even the in-group participants. But certainly the pleasing rituals had a pull at the time.

As Jared Diamond notes in "Guns, Germs and Steel", one formative reason for religions is that they can regulate behaviours which cannot be left to chance - Hardin's 'tragedy of the commons' amongst them. By simply stipulating a prohibition, group outcomes are enhanced. Diamond's example is the prohibition on pig meat common to both Judaism and Islam: it solved a pressing issue in the newly-deforested and rapidly degrading Middle East of the time, as pigs' needs for forage in general and water in particular, competed directly with humans'. No eating them. No point in owning them. Problem solved.

But a growing issue is the reversion to tribal and religious thinking which accompanies the current exaltation of tribes in funny little NZ: a sort of mental irredentism. While the more risible forms (taniwha - monsters - which have impeded the planning for a major highway - you can't make this stuff up) can be dismissed, the underlying tendency towards 'magical thinking' is no laughing matter. Any abandonment of the intellect, in the sense of scientific thought, repeatedly demonstrable causes and effects and so on - is bound to undercut the very reasons for and energy of our current state of civilisation, however that's defined.

And this trend is not much better for art: which thrives at the edge of, or in the whirlpools between, great currents of thought. Ask yourself: how much good art over the past 300 years was produced by tribes, as opposed to by lonely outcasts, 'canaries in the coal mines' (as Kurt Vonnegut characterised the role of an artist), existential despair, war, love lost, alcohol and other chemical propellants, and some proportion at least, by individuals with certifiable mental illness?

Oh, there's that word again. Yes, Art is produced by Individuals. Hold that thought.